BB-9E and BB-8 Face Off in This Adorable ‘Star Wars’ Animated Short

Here’s a fun question for you: how many evil droids have there been in the Star Warsuniverse? There was the interrogation droid that tortured Dr. Leia in the original Star Wars; IG-88 and the jet-black C-3PO unit in The Empire Strikes Back; and a handful of trade federation robots in the Star Wars prequels, as well as K-2SO (sorta) in Rogue One. Come to think of it, while both Death Stars have always had a bunch of R2 and MSE units wandering around in the background, the Star Wars series has always been a little short on recognizable droid baddies.

That’s all about to change with the addition of BB-9E in Star Wars: The Last Jedi. One of the hottest-selling Star Wars characters at Force Friday this year, we still don’t know what exactly BB-9E does or who he belongs to, but we do know one thing: as this new Star Wars short (via SyFy) shows, he’s the perfect evil foible for BB-8. Seriously, they should’ve just slapped an evil mustache on BB-8 and released him as BB-9E, because that would’ve been just as effective.

Like most things connected to Star Wars: The Last Jedi, we’re pretty free to speculate wildly here, so here’s my bold guess: like Captain Phasma before him, BB-9E’s importance to Star Wars fans will vastly outweigh the amount of time he actually spends in the movie. Star Wars has always known the value of having highly marketable background characters you can market as plushies; there’s a reason I still think of Jawas as the coolest indigenous alien species, despite the fact that they appear in Star Wars for, what, less than five minutes? Unless, of course, Rian Johnson and company decided to give us the BB-Bowl as a showdown between the two droids. Oooh, yeah, let’s do that instead.

BB-Bowl or no, Star Wars: the Last Jedi will hit theaters on December 15, 2017.